Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Things That Should Be Nerfed

Right now, SA returns mana even if you are healed at full health. So SA and Vampiric Embrace have gone nuts. I think Blizzard will reign in SA by only applying it to actual healing.

It's actually interesting, because Heal-Over-Time heals don't tick if the target is at full health. So for a paladin, getting a HoT is worse than getting a direct heal, because you'll lose out on some mana.

All in all, SA working with overheals leads to odd behaviour, and I think that SA will get nerfed.

2. Flasks

I think that very powerful temporary buffs are a bad game design concept. The problem is that a raid which is willing to pay the costs for these buffs is significantly more powerful than a raid which isn't willing. And this leads to a dilemma when tuning content.

Should you tune content for the buffed raid, knowing that you are forcing every raid which wants to suceed to pay for the buffs every time they try this content? Or should you tune content for the unbuffed raid, knowing that the buffed raids are going to blow through the content?

It's far easier to just avoid the question and not have powerful temporary buffs. You can tune for permanent buffs, such as gear, because acquiring such buffs/items is a one-time, gradual, process.

In WoW, the major items that exhibit this problematic behaviour are high end alchemy flasks and elixirs. I think that the game would be better off without flasks. Then Blizzard could tune content to a more permanent gear level, and this would make life a lot easier for raid guilds.

Now it would be harsh on alchemists, as their uber-items would no longer exist. I would suggest that they get something more permanent, perhaps very powerful transmutations.

Edit: Here's a random idea. What if alchemists could transmute magical items? You could take a BoP blue and transmute it into a couple BoE greens. Or maybe a lower-level BoE blue. Heh, this idea probably isn't very good, but it's something that isn't in the game yet.

10 comments:

I really don't see a need for SA to be nerfed when we already have one gimped tree and another that is totally useless in PvP, PvE, and Arenas. There are other things that need to be done before giving Blizzard the idea that we are too powerful.

SA working with overheals does mean that healers need to adapt their healing style significantly when grouping with a pally tank. Essentially, there is no such thing as overhealing with a pally tank - you're not overhealing, you're mana battery...ing. :)

I kinda like it - it provides some real diversity in my healing game. I'd be sad to see it go. I'd also wonder how much more difficult pally tanking would be without it. There have been a few pulls where my pumping out the overheals was the only thing that kept our tank throwing his consecrates.

Then again, I've only been running the 5-mans. I can see how this might be overpowered in a raid situation.

Ha! I didn't even think about the pally healers - priest blind spot for ya. ;)

That's an excellent point, and now that I think about it I'm sure that's what so much of the priest "pallies and efficiency" QQing is about. Perhaps it's more suitable as a Protection tree talent then, than as a base ability.

SA needs to be a base talent. It is simply too fundamental to paladin tanking. Making SA a Protection talent would be like making Druid Bear form a Feral talent.

Holy and Ret need to be able to tank in a pinch. That's what being a hybrid is all about.

There's already mutterings that Holy Shield should be a base talent, and I can kind of see the argument there. It's our version of Shield Block. Can you imagine the warrior outcry if Shield Block was the 31-point talent in Warrior Protection?

Well, it looks like your idea of nerfing flasks is happening. Blizzard announced that soon, they are changing Alchemy so that you can only have one offensive and one defensive elixir-based buff at once, and flasks take up both. This means that herbs and potions will likely be a lot less valuable than they used to be (the days of needing to buy a million elixirs for everybody in the raid are over)

BUT in return, they say that they will now be able to add a lot more recipes to Alchemy. They were having trouble adding more things to Alchemy before without having to balance the raids for having them. But if you have to pick and choose which elixir you're using, they can add a lot more variety. Besides which, they can make the instance encounters easier for the casual player since you don't need so many consumables just to have a chance.

My main is an alchemist, and I'm actually really excited to see where this goes.